Multi-Round Contention in Wireless LANs with Multipacket Reception

Multi-packet reception (MPR) has been recognized as a powerful capacity-enhancement technique for random-access wireless local area networks (WLANs). As is common with all random access protocols, the wireless channel is often under-utilized in MPR WLANs. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-round contention random-access protocol to address this problem. This work complements the existing random-access methods that are based on single-round contention. In the proposed scheme, stations are given multiple chances to contend for the channel until there are a sufficient number of ``winning" stations that can share the MPR channel for data packet transmission. The key issue here is the identification of the optimal time to stop the contention process and start data transmission. The solution corresponds to finding a desired tradeoff between channel utilization and contention overhead. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous analysis to characterize the optimal strategy using the theory of optimal stopping. An interesting result is that the optimal stopping strategy is a simple threshold-based rule, which stops the contention process as soon as the total number of winning stations exceeds a certain threshold. Compared with the conventional single-round contention protocol, the multi-round contention scheme significantly enhances channel utilization when the MPR capability of the channel is small to medium. Meanwhile, the scheme automatically falls back to single-round contention when the MPR capability is very large, in which case the throughput penalty due to random access is already small even with single-round contention

Maximum Throughput of a Cooperative Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio User

In this paper, we investigate the maximum throughput of a saturated rechargeable secondary user (SU) sharing the spectrum with a primary user (PU). The SU harvests energy packets (tokens) from the environment with a certain harvesting rate. All transmitters are assumed to have data buffers to store the incoming data packets. In addition to its own traffic buffer, the SU has a buffer for storing the admitted primary packets for relaying; and a buffer for storing the energy tokens harvested from the environment. We propose a new cooperative cognitive relaying protocol that allows the SU to relay a fraction of the undelivered primary packets. We consider an interference channel model (or a multipacket reception (MPR) channel model), where concurrent transmissions can survive from interference with certain probability characterized by the complement of channel outages. The proposed protocol exploits the primary queue burstiness and receivers' MPR capability. In addition, it efficiently expends the secondary energy tokens under the objective of secondary throughput maximization. Our numerical results show the benefits of cooperation, receivers' MPR capability, and secondary energy queue arrival rate on the system performance from a network layer standpoint.Comment: Part of this paper was accepted for publication in PIMRC 201

On multiple access random medium access control

In this paper, we develop a new class of medium access control protocol, which allows each user to transmit at different data rates chosen randomly from an appropriately determined set of rates. By using successive interference cancellation, multiple packets can be received simultaneously. In slotted Aloha type Gaussian networks, we show that the achievable total throughput of the proposed protocol is at least a constant fraction of the mac sum rate when the number of transmission rates at each node is equal to the number of users in the network. We also study the case when only a limited number of transmission rates is available at each node. Extension to rate splitting is discussed. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a significant throughput gain over the conventional Aloha

Interference-Based Optimal Power-Efficient Access Scheme for Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose a new optimization-based access strategy of multipacket reception (MPR) channel for multiple secondary users (SUs) accessing the primary user (PU) spectrum opportunistically. We devise an analytical model that realizes the multipacket access strategy of SUs that maximizes the throughput of individual backlogged SUs subject to queue stability of the PU. All the network receiving nodes have MPR capability. We aim at maximizing the throughput of the individual SUs such that the PU's queue is maintained stable. Moreover, we are interested in providing an energy-efficient cognitive scheme. Therefore, we include energy constraints on the PU and SU average transmitted energy to the optimization problem. Each SU accesses the medium with certain probability that depends on the PU's activity, i.e., active or inactive. The numerical results show the advantage in terms of SU throughput of the proposed scheme over the conventional access scheme, where the SUs access the channel randomly with fixed power when the PU is sensed to be idle

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201